“Waterboarding is torture,” he said, in response to the No. 1 question at his hearing, first posed by chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, but amplified by other senators. Asked whether “painful stress positions, threatening with dogs, forced nudity, and mock executions” also constituted torture, he first said he was “not as familiar with those techniques,” then added: “I believe they do.”

At issue is restoring a basic principle, he said: that the Department of Justice represents “not any one president, not any political party, but the people.”

Concerns about politicization of the department cross party lines. In the 1990s, Republicans complained that Attorney General Janet Reno was too protective of the Clinton White House. Sen. Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary panel, pressed Holder on his own independence from White House influence, citing his role in the controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich in 2001. My decisions were not always perfect. I made mistakes. With the benefit of hindsight I can see my errors clearly and I can tell you how I have learned from them,” he said.

Pressed on how an Obama administration would try detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Holder often declined to be specific. “I don’t think the military commissions that we now have in place have all of the due process requirements that I would like to see,” he said. He added that the president-elect was committed to closing the prison at Guantanamo.

One proposal has been to shift detainees to the US maximum security prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. “Ft. Leavenworth does not want these detainees,” said Sen. Sam Brownback (R) of Kansas. “It gets in the way of their primary mission, which is education.”